Friday, July 25, 2014

The Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Mathematical Texts

Cuneiform
writing was invented some 5000 years ago in southern Iraq for the
purpose of keeping accounts - and for the next few hundred years
book-keeping remained its sole use. The last datable cuneiform tablet,
also from southern Iraq, is an astronomical diary for the year 75 CE.
For the three millennia spanning the rise and fall of cuneiform
writing, and arguably for some time after, numeracy was an inseparable
and essential part of literate culture throughout the Middle East.While
the vast majority of cuneiform tablets contain numerical data, written
by professional scribes, a smaller number are the outcome of teaching,
learning, or communicating mathematical techniques or ideas as part of
scribal education. This website presents transliterations and
translations of around a thousand published cuneiform mathematical
tablets; a similar number await decipherment and analysis in museums
around the world.

The
text and editions on this site are by Eleanor Robson whose work on this
project was supported by an Early Career Fellowship from the University
of Cambridge's Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and
Humanities in January-March 2007.

The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.

The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.

AWOL is the successor to Abzu, a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world, founded at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago in 1994. Together they represent the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline.